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Founded in 1929
The Museum of Modern Art was conceived in 1929 by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Lillie P. Bliss and Mary Quinn Sullivan. It opened on 7 November 1929, nine days after the Wall Street Crash, in rented rooms on the 12th floor of the Heckscher Building at 730 Fifth Avenue, with Alfred H. Barr Jr. as its first director.


A home on 53rd Street
The museum’s building at 11 West 53rd Street, designed in the International Style by Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone, opened on 10 May 1939, with an address by President Franklin D. Roosevelt broadcast from the White House. A sculpture garden opened the same year; Philip Johnson redesigned it in 1953 as the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden.
A museum that keeps growing
César Pelli more than doubled the gallery space in 1983. Yoshio Taniguchi’s rebuilding reopened on 20 November 2004, and an expansion by Diller Scofidio + Renfro with Gensler reopened on 21 October 2019, adding 47,000 square feet of galleries. The collection now numbers about 200,000 works.

